Dupree 1

Savannah Dupree

Professor Debra Jizi

UWRT 1103-012

20 March 2018

1. What are the effects on families of firefighters?

a. (physical effects, emotional effects, financial effects)

2. The reason that I chose this topic is because my dad is a firefighter. For 17 years of my

life he was gone for 24 hours at a time because that is how shifts at the fire department

work. With him being gone so much my mom had to take over disciplining and making

decisions for our family. This put a strain on their relationship because she was seen as

the “mean” parent and he was seen as the “fun” parent. Another effect of him being gone

so much was I was not able to have as close of a relationship with him as most of my

friends did with their dads. The physical strain of being a firefighter is more than most

people can take. As my dad has aged, he definitely has more health problems and looks

older than most people his age. He has knee and shoulder problems from all the years of

running in and out of fires carrying bodies and crawling into tight spaces. Through this

inquiry, I hope to find out if other families of first responders experience the same things

that my family has, what exactly the health risks are of being a firefighter and if you can

do anything to prevent them, and why they are paid so little for the great, heroic work

they do

3. Since my dad is a firefighter I do have many preconceptions about the job and the effects

of the job. I believe that having a parent or a spouse that is a first responder can cause a

great amount of stress on a person. I believe that there is a huge physical strain on
 Dupree 2

firefighters’ bodies from crawling in and out of tight spaces and from carrying bodies of

all sizes out of fires. I believe that there is a possible link between shorter life span and

being a firefighter because of the amount of smoke inhaled and how hard that can be on a

person’s lungs or even the commonality where they die fighting a fire. I believe that they

should get paid more because they literally run into fires to save lives. There’s not too

many people out there that would voluntarily do that, but they do. Although I believe all

of these things about my topic so far, I will do my best to not let any of it bias my

research. The things I believe are based on what I have seen, not scientific research.